5 Ways Of Finding Topical Sites For SEO Link Building
There’s no better time of the year to sit down and assess your yearly SEO strategy than January. Quite simply, the earlier, the better. You need to put structures in place for your own content strategy and offsite link building as soon as possible. Otherwise you’re probably going to spend another year, working on various SEO techniques on an ad hoc basis, seeing fluctuating results and never really being able to establish what’s worked and what hasn’t.
Obviously with the freshness update in mind, lots of people are going to be spending time focussing on their own content strategies and making their own content as good as it can possibly be. Rightly so, as your very best content should always be placed on your own website to cement your position as an industry expert. However, the sensible SEO professionals out there know that if you dedicate too much time to one aspect of SEO, you’ll lose out when those next algorithm updates undoubtedly hone in on an aspect of SEO which you’ve dedicated less time to.
One thing we do know is that as well as actual domain authority, Google looks set to continue to give additional rewards to those gaining links from on topic websites. A topical authority metric is yet to be established, but if you find an on topic site with high domain authority, you’re on the right track.
Here are five ways at finding on topic sites for whatever link building methods you should choose to undertaken.
Google Operators
Get familiar with Google operators as they are the quickest and easiest way to start finding on topic websites. The information on Google operators is freely available and is your fast track to finding relevanmt niche specific websites. Simple searches using searches such as inurl:”write-for-us” or intitle:”guest blogging” combined with keywords will enable you to find blogs or sites that are open to guest blogging. The more you become familiar with Google operators, the more likely you are to find innovative footprints which will enable you to identify on topic sites for a variety of link building techniques.
Top 10 Lists
Top 10 lists are a great way to start the snowball effect in finding the best websites in a particular industry. Generally those sites featured in top 10 lists are likely to have pretty good domain metrics too. Top 10 lists can be found easily through a simple Google search or again if you begin to use Google operators you may be able to find more specific Top 10 lists. From here you can contact these sites directly but also take a look at their backlinks profile and see who is linking to them. This way you’re likely to find a whole bunch of other industry related sites. Take a look at those websites and continue this process and you’ll end up with a huge list of on topic sites ready to filter by your specifications.
Author Footprints
We all know that blogging platforms exist for SEO linkbuilding methods and to bridge the gap between site owners and bloggers and you can take advantage of this in a pretty clever way. There are a couple of ways in which you can find an author profile or their footprint but here are two that work pretty well. The first is to go into a blogging platform such as MyBlogGuest, filter by your specific industry and then use a scraping tool to take all of the blog owners usernames. You can then perform a Google search for something such as ‘allintext:” and see other activity those site owners are engaged in.
The second method is to keep track of other high profile guest bloggers that you know of within your industry, track their movements online and then acquire the very same leads. Again, most guest bloggers use the same username across a variety of sites or their own name within an author bio. You can therefore perform a Google search with this information, track down any of their leads and acquire links from these sites for yourself.
Twitter Lists
Firstly you can perform a Google search query using a mix of operators to find the best lists. This can be done by using the query “site: twitter.com inurl:lists “your keyword here””. You’ll then be gifted a list of urls which link to Twitter lists. What you really want from these lists is the username of those followed by these lists. These are likely to be experts/bloggers in your field that you can then go away are repeat the ‘author footprints’ process to find sites they are regular using or link building from. Alternatively you can manually go through the Twitter lists and find direct links to websites from the user’s Twitter profiles.
Competitor Analysis
Of course one of the best ways in finding on topic sites for link building activity is to break down your competitors back link profiles. You might find that some of your competitor links are auto approve (such as guestbook links or comment links) in which case you can plug your own gaps by acquiring the same links as them straight away. You’ll also quickly be able to spot any high authority sites they are receiving links from and you’ll be able to manually visit these links and check to see whether they are topical sites which you feel you can get a link from. Do this for your top 10 competitors and you’ll soon establish a healthy on topic resource of sites for you to use on a regular basis.
( Original post by Scott via site-reference.com )
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